Future Prospects of the Garment Industry of Cambodia

This paper examines the impact of the participation of Vietnam to WTO as well as of the abolition of restrictions on Chinese exports of textiles and clothing to the US and EU on the Cambodian Economy, by using a computable general equilibrium model. A seminal aspect of this paper is that this paper has succeeded in constructing a Cambodia specific computable general equilibrium model by using one of the first ever input-output tables of Cambodia with 35 different production sectors. One of our most striking simulation results is that the welfare loss would be about 905 million US dollars when either the amount of exports of apparel products from Cambodia or the amount of imports of textiles to Cambodia decreases by 30 percent caused by the participation of Vietnam to WTO as well as the abolition of restrictions on Chinese exports. Another striking result is that the government should reduce the production tax rate for the apparel sector by 68.1 percent in order to keep the welfare of Cambodia unchanged when exports of apparel products decreases by 30 percent. Our simulation results predict that the Cambodian economy has substantially been damaged by the participation of Vietnam to WTO as well as the abolition of restrictions on Chinese exports to EU and the US.